Mechanic's creepers, sometimes known to those in the art simply as creepers, have traditionally been used to facilitate performing maintenance, repair or other mechanical work in restricted work environments, such as underneath and around vehicles, structures, and other mechanical or structural objects. They provide an alternative to sliding or wriggling one's body, typically while in a reclining or supine position, along the floor or ground in a restricted space.
Creepers generally comprise a platform suited for the mechanic to situate himself or herself in a reclining or supine position on the upper surface of the creeper, while the creeper is supported by a set of wheels or casters on the lower surface, providing an ability for the mechanic and creeper to translocate from one position to another. Some typical designs use swivel-mounted wheels or casters, in order to allow the creeper to translocate easily along both back-and-forth and side-to-side directions, providing for substantial freedom of motion along a substantially horizontal plane.
One typical application for usage of a creeper is to roll under a motor vehicle, for example, in order to access the vehicle's underside. This is typically done on a driveway or in a garage, where the ground or floor is substantially smooth, allowing the creeper's wheels or casters to roll along the floor substantially unhindered.
However, many applications where the usage of a creeper is highly desired, also pose considerable difficulty to the operation of the creeper. For instance, this is the case in environments where the ground surface within which a mechanic must work is rough, rocky, gravelly, sandy, soft, or otherwise not substantially smooth and hard. Many applications for usage of a creeper necessarily incorporate conditions such as these and cannot be delayed or transferred to a garage.
This is the case, for instance, when repair or maintenance must be done on specialized motor vehicles, trucks, construction equipment, and other mechanical machines located on a construction site or other field location. In such applications, it is typically a paramount priority to complete the maintenance or repair task quickly to allow the object requiring maintenance or repair to return to functional usage, while the cost of transporting the object off-site for maintenance or repair would be prohibitive. In other cases, the creeper must be used to access the underside of a fixture, such as a deck, an affixed trailer, a rig, or a pipeline. In these applications, there is no feasible option to transfer the object being accessed to a more convenient work environment.
While usage of creepers on such rough surfaces is thus a great priority, it is also very difficult. There is particular difficulty in the operation of the creeper's wheels or casters in traversing the surface, often adding a great deal of difficulty or stress to the mechanic's task or causing the wheels or casters, or their mountings, to sink in, erode or break.
New designs for creepers have therefore been introduced to try to improve their capacity to facilitate such jobs. For instance, larger wheels and mountings with reinforced strength have been introduced. However, these solutions do not ultimately alter the necessity of operating a creeper on a difficult surface.
Therefore, there persists a substantial need for an improved creeper, to cope more satisfactorily with difficult surfaces, beyond the capacity of the creepers presently known in the art. For example, there has been a particular need for creepers better suited to assist mechanics performing maintenance or repair or other mechanical work on large vehicles such as trucks and construction equipment. There has also been a particular need for creepers better suited to provide access in, under, and around fixtures such as houses, decks, warehouses, tanks, pipelines, etc. As another example, there has been a particular need for creepers better suited to assist mechanics performing maintenace or repair or other mechanical work in difficult environments, including outdoor environments on terrain that is rough, rocky, gravelly, sandy, soft, or otherwise not substantially smooth and hard.